The program will focus on job training and facilitating access to capital for startups developing promising clean technologies. It will also seek to connect the region's manufacturing capacity with its growing cleantech cluster.

"It's a complicated grant," said Sean Robbins, CEO of the economic development group Greater Portland Inc., which helped bring together more than 20 organizations from Oregon and southwest Washington to design the program. "It's focused on the commercialization of new cleantech technologies and how to move them from design to market. And, when we do that, on how to connect existing businesses with the supply chain and how we align the workforce to support it."

Supply chain development. PDC will further fund its effort to help existing companies get into the business of supplying new cleantech sectors. The PDC's work with the wind energy cluster is one example.

Research and development. PDC will work with Manufacturing 21 and area universities to connect companies with researchers under a program called Northwest Collaboratory for Sustainable Manufacturing.

"When we started working on this we talked about how we could design everything new or we could use what we were already doing," Harder said, adding that by leveraging existing economic development programs, PDC will be able to put the money from the grant to work more quickly, with the intent of creating jobs.

"This is a great opportunity for the region’s workforce boards to support our manufacturing industry and workers to take advantage of the growing opportunities in clean technology," said Andrew McGough, executive director of Worksystems, in a press release.

The federal challenge was set up to nurture industry clusters across the country in an effort to mimic the economic success of places such as California's Silicon Valley and North Carolina's Research Triangle Park.

@SustainableBzOR | christinawilliams@bizjournals.com | 503.219.3438

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